


Expectations

by jedusaur



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 01:16:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15919965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedusaur/pseuds/jedusaur
Summary: Derek is great at adapting to other people's styles. That's what makes him a good D-man. You watch what's in front of you and you stay with it. You pay attention to what other people are doing and you fit yourself in. You take on the high-pressure situations and you keep your cool and most of the time nobody notices you doing it.





	Expectations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cesy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cesy/gifts).



> This fic was an item in the Fandom Loves Puerto Rico charity auction. Despite the fact that it took me 10 months to follow through, Puerto Rico [still needs help](https://www.npr.org/2018/08/09/637230089/puerto-rico-estimates-it-will-cost-139-billion-to-fully-recover-from-hurricane-m). Please consider [donating](https://www.conprmetidos.org/).
> 
> Many thanks to fankyrie on Tumblr for her valuable beta feedback on my depiction of racial minority experiences in this fic.

_six_

"Who wants to play defense?"

No one raises their hand. Scoring goals is the best part.

"Well," says the coach. "If no one's gonna volunteer, I'll just have to pick. How about you, you look pretty tough."

It doesn't yet occur to Derek to wonder why he looks tough.

 

_ten_

"Did you see that crap he just pulled? Why didn't you fight him?"

Derek turns around to make sure Coach S is talking to him. "Was I supposed to?" 

"No," says Coach S. "Just surprised you didn't. Little bastard didn't even go to the box."

 

_twelve_

"Sorry, buddy, you're too valuable where you are. It's tough to find kids at this level who really understand how defense works."

"I could teach them," Derek says, swallowing back the frustration rising in his chest. He knows there's no point in pushing it, but he has to try. "It's easy. You just watch what's in front of you and stay with it."

The new kid is blond and tall and already knows a bunch of people's names even though he just moved here this summer. He's definitely getting the open center spot.

 

_fifteen_

"Did you see that shit he just pulled?"

"Next shift I'm on it," Derek says, and flexes his fingers in his gloves.

 

*

 

Derek takes the shot. It bounces off the opposing D and lands right on their center's tape as he speeds out of the zone. Dex races after him, too far behind to do any good. Derek can hear his "shit shit shit shit _shit_ " and Chowder's panicked little "oh no..." all too clearly. 

Dex bangs his stick on the boards on his way back to the bench. Derek doesn't tell him to chill, because if he doesn't actually chill he's going to land himself in the box. 

"What the hell were you doing all the way up at the hash marks?" Dex snaps at him when they're both back on the bench. "You hung me out to dry. You hung _Chowder_ out to dry."

"You should have been covering me," Derek says. "Did you not see me skate in?" 

"Shitty was wide open! Why would you take it in instead of passing?" 

"Why would you position yourself based off what you thought I should do instead of what you saw me doing?" 

"Why would your mom fuck her own cous--" 

"Dex!" Coach Murray wedges his hip between the two of them from behind the bench. "Cool it."

They're definitely getting a talk later about communication. Derek is almost glad. If Dex won't listen to him, maybe he'll listen to the coaches. 

He's half right. There's a talk after the game about that breakaway, but Dex isn't there, and it isn't about communication; it's about showboating. Derek nods and looks contrite and silently seethes.

 

*

 

Derek is on the ice when Wicks breaks his wrist. It doesn't look that bad at first--he catches a divot thirty feet away from the puck and lands on his arm funky, and it takes almost fifteen seconds for the refs to notice that he isn't getting up and blow down the play. 

As the trainers are helping him off the ice, the coaches whisper frantically about lines. Normally it wouldn't be a problem to have somebody double-shift for the rest of the game, but they're already down a center because Duby's out sick, plus O'Malley is playing through a knee problem and shouldn't be skating too hard. Derek listens to them argue for a while about which of the wingers would be least disastrous at center, then he decides: fuck it. He stopped trying sometime around bantam, but deep down he's been wanting to give this a shot since he was six years old.

"I can play center," he says. 

The coaches eye him dubiously. "You've played it before?" asks Hall. 

"Yup." Only in high school pickup games where no one really bothered playing defense, but Murray didn't ask if he's played it with a clock running and points on the line. "O'Malley's strong on the backcheck, he can play D if you keep his minutes light. Just have him hang way back so he doesn't rip apart his knee trying to work up speed."

The coaches look at each other. Wicks is off the ice and the officials aren't going to wait much longer for them to sort themselves out. 

"Okay," says Hall. "Go take the faceoff."

 

*

 

Derek blows past the hash marks and thinks _oh shit I shouldn't--_ and then _wait no yes I should_ and takes a shot from the bottom of the slot, and holy shit, he's never tried heroin but he bets it feels exactly like this. His snapshot is a joke because this is literally the first time he's ever used it in an actual game, but up until the puck leaves his blade, he's flying.

It's about control, he thinks. Defense is all about reacting to the situation. There's always one best move to make and his job is to make that move. On D, quarterbacking the power play is the most he ever gets to actively drive play. Here at center, he's driving play all through the neutral and offensive zones. Even in their own zone, the breakouts are different--he doesn't have to pass, he can take it forward or bank it off the boards to himself, and when he does pass he's immediately moving forward and getting open to stay in the action. It's a whole new angle on the game.

"Don't go dancing in with it when you've got a guy open on the blue line," Murray says when he gets back to the bench, but Derek didn't give up the puck, so he's clearly not that mad. Derek nods, heaving in breaths. The shifts are shorter up front, but center is a two-way position, and with O'Malley limping around on D, Derek has been working hard in Samwell's zone. Having been screwed over as a D-man by plenty of cherrypicking centers panting for points, he knows perfectly well what kind of defensive responsibilities he needs to take on.

He passes more on his next shift to appease Murray, more than he actually should, but it takes the opposition off-guard when he has a semi-clear shooting lane and knocks it back to the D instead of going for it, and O'Malley rips off a pretty little wrister from the top of the circle for his first goal as a defenseman. Then at the end of the third Derek heads in on the rush and takes a shot from further back than the goalie expects, and just like that he's got his first goal as a forward. Shaking up the positions has its upsides, apparently.

He ends up second star of the game, and walks back into the locker room to thunderous applause. It's pretty fucking great.

Dex isn't clapping. He had an awful third period paired up with O'Malley, who actually did mostly fine on D from what Derek saw, but the two of them weren't clicking with each other at all. Derek ignores his sulking. They won, it's fine, he's got a spotlight to bask in.

 

*

 

Dex gets a lot harder to ignore when the coaches decide to keep Derek at center for the next game.

"You're fucking kidding me," he says as soon as Hall is out of earshot. "Why do you always have to make everything such a pain in the ass, Nurse?"

"Me?" Derek raises his eyebrows just enough to be condescending, but not enough to satisfy Dex's thirst for a reaction. There's an art to it. "Not my call, dude."

"It was your idea! You asked them to put you on center, I heard you!"

Derek shoots him some side-eye. He doesn't even have to say the word "chill" anymore to get Dex riled up, it's just implied in his expression. The rest of the team ignores them like usual. No one tries to get between the two of them anymore.

"Do you seriously hate me so much you're gonna change up your position to get away from me?" Dex demands.

Derek snorts. "Yup. Nailed it. This, like everything else, is about you."

Dex breaks a zipper closing his bag. Derek grins.

 

*

 

At breakfast the next morning, Dex sits down across from Derek like he's settling into the dentist's chair for an unmedicated root canal and says, "Do you actually want to play center?"

Derek would bet five hundred dollars that sometime last night or this morning Bitty had a little heart-to-heart with Dex about problem-solving approaches. "Doesn't matter," he says. "Coaches decide where to put me."

Dex clenches his jaw. "If you told them you wanted to be back on D, they'd listen."

Derek finishes his omelet in silence, trying to decide whether he actually wants to open this can of worms. Eventually he can't stop himself. "Is that actually how your life works?" he asks. "You don't like what the people in charge decide, so you go politely encourage them to decide something different and they just... do?"

Dex groans. "No, oh my god. I'm not saying they'll just do what you ask them to, I'm saying if you don't want to be on center, they'll listen to what you have to say and take it into account. They're not complete assholes. They listened to you when you brought it up in the first place, didn't they?"

Derek thinks about chasing the point, trying to put into words the infuriating unspoken undercurrents that can't be avoided when white authority figures listen to what a brown kid has to say. Maybe if it was Shitty or Holster telling him to go complain to the coaches, he might try to explain. 

"You didn't answer my question," says Dex, and he doesn't sound overtly hostile anymore, just grumpy. "Do you actually want to be playing center?"

If it were someone else asking, Derek might admit that he's not sure. Playing center is exciting, but there are things he likes better about defense. He's never really had a chance to figure out for himself what position he'd like to play, given the choice.

He wants that chance. He wants that choice.

Yeah, he's not about to show that kind of vulnerability to this fuckwad. "Yup," he says. "Having a blast. Good luck figuring out how to not fuck up on D without me there to cover your ass."

He picks up his plate and heads to the dish conveyor belt without waiting for a response.

 

*

 

Derek doesn't get any points in the next game, but neither does anyone else--it's a total blowout, 5-0. He does get a few good chances, which is better than a lot of the guys can say. Dex gets paired with some kid making the lineup for the first time this season, and has one of his worst games since he started at Samwell. He's on the ice with Ransom for the last goal against, after a messy change attempt shakes up the pairings, and in the locker room he's fuming even more than the rest of the team.

Derek tries to nap on the bus home, but his brain is busy rehashing everything he should have done differently. On defense there's a right move, and it's usually clear to him in retrospect whether the move he made was it. On center, it's not always so obvious whether he could have handled any given situation better. They both require all the on-ice awareness Derek's got, but now he has to use it differently. Communication is more complicated now that he has to coordinate with his D and his wingers all at the same time, instead of just staying in tune with one guy and keeping an eye on everyone else.

"You're so good, though," he hears Dex saying in a low tone. "If I can't hack it paired with you, I must be the problem."

There's no way he would have said that if he'd realized Derek could hear him. Derek thinks about saying something, but whatever. If he doesn't want to be overheard, he shouldn't be talking in a bus full of people.

"Dude, we were out there together for like twenty seconds," Ransom says. "And you were trying to change that whole time, you were gassed. You can't draw any conclusions from that."

"But I've been dragging the team down since Nursey moved to center," Dex protests, which is the most reasonable thing Derek's ever heard him say. It's true, he's been a real mess.

"Hey, you played with the same guys the whole time you were growing up, right?" That's Holster, obviously sitting next to Ransom.

"Yeah," says Dex. "I knew those guys better than I knew my brother."

"So you've never really had to practice getting to know a new D partner," says Holster. "You're better with Nursey because you've been paired with him the most, so you know his game the best. You're fucking up with different guys because you keep expecting them to act like the guys you knew. Don't just get mad when your style doesn't mesh with your partner's, change it up so it works. You gotta play with the guy you're playing with, not the guy in your head."

That's exactly what Derek told Dex on the bench when he was bitching about Derek carrying in the puck last week. Dex wasn't listening then, based on the way he says, "Huh..." like his mind is blown by this fresh wisdom Holster has imparted. Derek clenches his teeth.

"Give it some time and don't be too hard on yourself," advises Ransom. "Getting frustrated has more of a negative effect on your game than pretty much anything else. Hey, are those Reese's Pieces?"

Silence falls again, except for the rattling of the candies that Dex is presumably sharing, since no one is giving him shit about bogarting the sugar.

Derek doesn't get that nap in, and he doesn't sleep all that well that night either. 

 

*

 

Derek is great at adapting to other people's styles. That's what makes him a good D-man. You watch what's in front of you and you stay with it. You pay attention to what other people are doing and you fit yourself in. You take on the high-pressure situations and you keep your cool and most of the time nobody notices you doing it.

You meet expectations.

 

*

 

Derek hasn't played another game as electric as that first one at center, but he's doing good. Better than O'Malley with his bum knee would have, for sure. Communication is tough but he's doing okay with it, he's getting better at determining when to pass and when to deke under pressure, his on-ice awareness is serving him very well, and he even doesn't suck too bad at faceoffs.

And he misses playing D. 

He misses watching plays develop, snapping into action at the right moment, making the call whether to keep at the line or drop back in case of a rush. He misses the quiet grateful shoulder-knocks on the bench after he saves all their asses and doesn't get a cheer because college hockey crowds don't understand skill unless it lands a puck in a net. He misses fistbumping the D pairing coming off as they change after a whistle, like a passing of a baton. He misses his goalie--he wouldn't have thought being positioned a few feet further away would make that much of a difference, but when he's at center he barely talks to Chowder at all.

He misses having a partner.

It's not Dex he misses. It's having one person to focus on, to be in sync with, to be his first glance in dangerous game situations, to toss him his water bottle without asking after they hit the bench. It's about that dynamic, that partnership. He's had it with most of his D partners over the years, and whenever it wasn't there, he was miserable. It's a core element of defense, instinctively keeping tabs on where your counterpart is at all times. Being on a forward line with two other people isn't anywhere near the same.

Derek's not sure if he misses it because that's genuinely how he prefers to play, or if it's just what he's used to. It feels like the distinction matters.

 

*

 

Bitty twirls into the zone, tries to dart between the D, and gets stripped of the puck. Murray sighs and shakes his head. Nobody says jack shit about showboating. Derek bites the inside of his cheek and keeps his mouth shut.

 

*

 

On Thursday Duby is back in business and Derek is lining up behind the circle instead of inside it, a familiar pale freckled face lurking in his peripheral vision. He wasn't sure how he was going to feel about it--as it turns out, he's not sorry to be back in his comfort zone. But he's not sorry he left it, either. It satisfied his curiosity, and gave him some perspective on what he really wants.

They win the game. As everyone else is pouring off the bench to knock heads with Chowder, Derek takes a deep breath and says, "Dex."

Dex hangs back, waiting.

"I want to play D," says Derek. "Smart D. I don't get my rocks off crashing into people, I don't like dropping the gloves. I like blocking shots because it means I picked the right place to be, not because it makes me look tough. I like picking the puck off a guy's stick and leaving him wondering what happened. I'm gonna take risks, and I'm gonna need you to have my back."

Wordlessly, Dex holds out a glove. Derek bumps it with his own.

"Nursey!" shouts Chowder excitedly as they skate over to him. "You should try playing goalie! You could do anything, Nursey!"

Derek grins. "Yeah," he says, bumping his helmet against Chowder's mask. "I could."

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to Ryan T, who always drops back to the neutral zone to cover me when I go deep and hands me my water bottle on the bench without having to be asked. I was stuck on this fic for a long time, and playing with Ryan gave me so many feelings about defense and partnership that it finally crystallized.


End file.
